Unveiling

Unveiling is a conceptual monograph comprised of past and recent artworks connected to Alanna Fields’s projects, As We Were, Audacity, Mirages of Dreams Past, and Constellations: Our Love Was Deeply Purple. These series are center on Fields’s ongoing research on Black Queer Archives and the power of representation and speculation through vernacular imagery. As both a book and an object, Unveiling symbolizes the complexities and limitations of visibility and invisibility, while breaking open veils that reveal audacious queering. Meditating on Black Queer memory, vulnerability, and desire, this monograph brings to focus everyday representations of Black Queer life in the U.S. between the 1920s and 1990s. The design of the publication, developed in collaboration with Alanna Fields, Brian Paul Lamotte, and Pablo Lerma of Meteoro Editions, is closely connected to the tactility and visual properties of Fields’s original artworks, where painting, layering, repetition, fragmentation, opacity, and transparency become intermediaries to unveil the identities of the figures pictured. Throughout the immersive imagery in Unveiling, there lies whispers of poems and reflections on queer introspection by Sumia Juxun that thread and weave each section of the book together in a beautiful cadence.